HOW I GOT HERE
SRS painting, The Farm, Addison, Maine, summer 1995
Photo by Priscilla Drucker of Amherst, MA
In the summers when I was young, my brother, John, and I played in a slapped-together, sun-bleached, sand-scoured house built from driftwood. We kept purple garter snakes in jars with pierced lids and swore faithfulness to our club. We signed a contract in blood, pricking our wrists with pins. Raised on Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows, we called our fort Mole Fort. Our war cry was, “A mole! A mole!”
The author in front of Mole Fort
The Swiss Family Robinson, The Narnia Chronicles, Huckleberry Finn, and Treasure Island: these were only a fraction of the books Mother read aloud to John and me at suppertime. I grew up believing the things I needed in life would come to me. If I needed rubber, then, like the Swiss Family Robinson, I would discover a caoutchouc tree. This is how Drawing/Writing came to me. It was a necessary gift provided by the needs and searchings of my personal and professional life.
Mom’s paint box
When I was ten, my mother gave me her wooden paint box and her oil paints and her canvas boards. It was then that I began to paint. My son now has that box. He, too, is a painter. If my son gives that box to a child of his, it will become like a blood memory. I loved painting from the moment I opened that wooden box. I loved the smell of oils, linseed oil, turpentine. My heart beats faster when I smell them now.
Like many children of my time, I was a serious writer. One of my works was a play called “The Day the Doctor Got Sick.” I wrote, directed and acted in it. My brother and I put it on in the airy attic of our Philadelphia house using a silk parachute my Dad brought back from the war as the curtain. I think it was my Grandmother Rich who gave me my first journal. It was one of those small diaries with a floral cover and a pretend-brass lock and a tiny key. I wrote and painted to record and to understand my life. I have never stopped.
The color of the blue sky above the long, purling shore of Long Beach Island on the New Jersey Shore smote me. I painted the beach, the water (very difficult), and flowers. I painted my beagle, Cannifer Flips (an approximation of the name for the antiseptic we put on bug bites called Campho-Phenique). My mother’s constant letter writing, her reading aloud, her talking to us about books taught me the pull and the importance, the magic and the necessity of language.
Our mother read, wrote, talked, and thought a good deal. We did not have television until I was twelve. By then, I was a dedicated reader and a writer—not so unusual for a child born in 1942. Many people think that children who write and paint have special talents. They do not. Given encouragement and exposure, children are by nature artists and writers.
My mother did everything to encourage me. She let me paint over a mural of an Arcadian landscape in our formal dining room. I replaced languid shepherdesses
and filmy trees with starkly geometric shapes. I was allowed to make art; I had the paints, the time, the encouragement, and the walls.
Like many children, I was always constructing things: paper dolls with curvy figures, dioramas of King Arthur’s court complete with stand-ups of mice scurrying off with hunks of cheese and dogs battling for bones in the shredded paper straw. I Scotch-taped scraps of satin to the walls to give the eye a feel for tapestries. My mother approved another request: she let me work with clay in my bedroom. The bust I sculpted is still where my mother put it in southern Arizona thirty-five years ago.
I spent hours in my room. In high school, it was routine to spend five hours a night on homework. I continued to write in my journals. When I applied to college, my one question was whether I could get a single room. I needed a place to work—a room of my own. By that time I was writing eight or nine hours at a stretch in my journals.
Self-portrait, Cambridge, 1961
At Radcliffe, I majored in Classics and English and studied painting with Theodore Lux Feininger, Lionel Feininger’s son. The main thing I remember TLF saying was, “Paint more.” I had the time, the space, and a permissive presence. In those days, the studio courses at Harvard were located in the attic of the Fogg Art Museum—where the print library is now. My son sculpts and paints in the Carpenter Center designed by Le Corbusier—a whole building set aside for Visual and Environmental Studies. It did not take me long to complete the studio courses offered at that time. The German theologian, Paul Tillich, was at Harvard. I signed up for his courses to fill the vacuum, and was privileged to experience Tillich’s “Harvard years.”
In college, I fell into a rhythm of painting half the year and writing half the year. I would paint until I had no more to say as a painter, and then I would start to write again. I studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell. I gave readings at Lamont library. Throughout it all, I kept my journals.
Poem “The Doll,” 1962 the first poem in my own voice according to Robert Lowell.
After college, a traveling fellowship took me to Europe for a year of drawing and writing. I wrote and illustrated a book called Chez Les Autres. Then, I married a Harvard man and we had three children.
Portrait of Jessica, Samuel and Sarah, c. 1991
We spent summers on the coast of Maine. I wrote a musical about those summers. I wrote a book of poetry for my mother’s sixty-fourth birthday which we all celebrated in Maine. After that, I stopped writing except for letters. I continued to paint at night—in the basement, in the kitchen, in the garage.
My mother died of cancer. Before she died, she survived two open heart surgeries. Sometime after the first and before the second surgery, she began to write culinary murder mysteries. Mother had been a home economics and journalism major at the University of Iowa at Ames. In her books, food or food-related items are the culprit, like sharp dicing knives. I had always known she should write. At last, she was taking time for her work. Each book was place-specific, allowing her to record her memories of Iowa, Maine, Nantucket and Arizona.
As my mother lay dying, I started my first novel, All Saints. It, too, is place specific, and describes life in a tiny town in Western Massachusetts which I call “Never-never land.” It was about this time that I started teaching. I became an art teacher. Five years later, I switched to teaching English.
I entered an MAT program and it was at this point that I developed the drawing half of the Drawing/Writing program as a teaching assistant in Basic Drawing and Design. A doctorate was the next logical step. To prepare for it, I talked to people in the fields of medicine, neurobiology, and education—Maxine Greene, Lucy Calkins, David Perkins, Seymour Papert, and Rodolpho Llinas. I corresponded with Albert Galaburda, Michael Gazzaniga, Candace Pert, Stephen Kosslyn, and Howard Gardner. At New York University Hospital, I computer-researched two fields—learning disabilities and mental illness—to determine whether there were sufficient reasons to spend the next few years, or maybe the rest of my life, promoting the educational usefulness of drawing to writing.
Why was I driven? I knew some children whose early learning experiences were negative and repressive. These children were ready to greet the world with open arms and minds and the world rebuffed them. These children became uncertain, fearful even, about learning. I felt a passionate concern. How could I help? I looked at my own life and at my teaching. I knew that the arts were among the most direct ways to develop identity and mind. I also knew that the arts required redefinition if they were to be regarded as central to education. The evidence must lie in an obvious place: brain science. I began taking courses in undergraduate neurobiology. I read widely in the field. My university professor, Dr. Katherine Fite, agreed to sit on my comprehensives committee. By studying neurobiology, linguistics, education, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence—the field described as cognitive science—I found some of the answers I was searching for.
My doctoral research concentrated on three questions:
Applying to the Breadloaf School of English at Middlebury College, Oxford, I spent the summer of 1992 at a keyboard at Lincoln College, rewriting my dissertation. The result was Drawing/Writing: The Magic Mirror. A handbook for teachers.
At this time, I started down several new and uncertain paths: single parenthood, a new community, a search for a new home and a new job. I became an adjunct college professor, teaching art history.
In 1995, I chaired and presented a session called “Drawing and Writing: Connections and Implications” at the College Art Association conference in San Antonio, Texas. Eighty art educators asked for a guide to Drawing/Writing. I hired a freelance editor and built a mini-team to rewrite the book again, this time as a highly visual text. Two and one-half years later, I am self-publishing the book. It is now called Drawing/Writing and the new literacy. I am still a painter and a writer. I am still a mother. I have also become an empassioned teacher with one goal: encouraging and developing intelligence through drawing and writing.
Self Portrait, after Vézelay, 1993
Mothers and self-belief
Photo, Virginia Rich
From her book jacket, The Cooking School Murders
Author’s photo copyright (c) 1982 W.M. Sommerville,
E.P. Dutton, Inc., New York
I have told you about my childhood so that you will understand that there was one person in my life who loved me very much. She taught me to write by her example of writing. She taught me to read by her example of reading. She listened to my papers. She looked at my drawings and paintings. She let me work with red clay in my bedroom. She let me paint on the walls of the dining room. She talked with me about people and ideas. She laughed with me. My mother taught me this: if you have to write to get along in life, or if you have to paint, then you are a writer, you are a painter. Being either has nothing to do with how good or how famous you are.
You can probably name someone who did the same thing for you as my mother did for me. Maybe it was your mother or your father, aunt or uncle, grandmother or grandfather—or a neighbor or a teacher. Someone let you do the things you had to do to find out who you were. These people are the helpers.
As teachers, we may choose to help through art or English, through history or science or math or music, but what we are really doing is helping students to be. As teachers, we are encouraging language, thought, and being.
Mathematics, music, the sciences, and the arts are languages. We all can learn to speak several of them. I believe that drawing is a lovely arching bridge with giant heroic figures beckoning us over into language: “Come over! Come over!”
The conviction that drives this book is the recognition that I am not unique. A new generation of children has the same potential I had. They, too, can learn the two languages of drawing and writing.
I feel whole and connected when I write or paint. I feel most at peace and “right with the world” when I lift a brush and move it toward a canvas. This action—so introductory, so tentative—eases my mind in some deep way. I am starting to understand the complex nature of this peace. The Latin verb “creo, creare” means to “to make,” or “to do.” Having been raised in the Episcopal Church, I associate how I feel when I paint with the “peace which passeth understanding”—that state of spirit achieved by the action of creation which means so much and which is impossible to say aloud without lisping.
I pass my understanding on to you; writing and drawing achieve wholeness and connection in a world of fragments and missed connections.
We are all artists and writers.
My chop brought from China
by Dr. Claire W. Carlson
Page design and construction by Plummer's Mines
Page maintenance by WebFoot Graphics
